Shooting a sex scene in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy on Pridefest day

Today we pulled off a shoot for our movie Go South for Animal Index in the courtyard at Atomic Cowboy, which has just enough leafy fenceline to suggest a fence around a military base in a remote location. The scene I wanted to shoot was a soldier paying for and having sex with a whore who works the fenceline around the base.

John Parker is our soldier.

D'Mari Martinez played the whore.

We had trouble casting the whore role at the last minute, after a couple of actors backed out. In case we were shooting without the whore character, I lined up some other characters who could interact with our soldier along the fenceline. Martin Sophia is a recent recruit to play one of the tribal men who lives near the base.




Our crew for the shoot was Laurent Torno III, director of photography, and V "Elly" Smith.

John and Martin were the first actors on location, so we shot them walking along the fenceline and walking past one another.




The shooting script calls for lots of walking and passing shots to establish a complex, interconnected world of military base, bush, tribal encampment and uranium (zombie) mine. This approximates the actual world of Los Alamos, a secret military base built on a former Hopi mesa surrounded by tribal peoples and not far from uranium minds worked by Navajo.

I'm amused we are able to create some of this tricky illusion in the courtyard of a bar that has things like giant paintings of beers on the wall that can never enter any of our shots without ruining everything. Martin is from Kenya, by the way, and his costume is traditional; the drum was made by my brother in law, a traditional craftsman from Ghana.

 

The motivation of the soldier character is pretty clear -- he is out to get laid. The tribal man, on the other hand, is on his way to a healing ceremony. He is moving toward the spirit like the soldier is moving toward the flesh. The main action of the tribe in the movie is to conduct a series of healing ceremonies for a sick child.

The hat is a St. Louis original -- Robert Van Dillen made it for our Art Invitational to The Sydney Highrise Variations. The hat is actually a work of art titled "At apogee". I like it for this costume because it incorporates feathers. Our tribal people in the movie are a collage of native peoples who mined uranium for the atomic bomb project. This includes native Africans (though not Kenyans) and native Americans, all of whom worked feathers into their sacred headdresses.

Our shoot was complicated in an amusing way by the need to get a parade float out of the same courtyard where we were shooting. The Pridefest parade was today, and Atomic Cowboy had a gang of friends come by to take out the Grovefest float. Atomic Cowboy co-owner Jim Kellogg is in the rear in the red shirt. Jim has been a great ally of Poetry Scores.

Our shoot was minimally affected by them making their merry way onto the street and toward the parade. The other Atomic Cowboy co-owner Chip Schloss brings up the rear here.

I also called George Malich to come out and play his priest character. I wanted the priest to walk past the soldier, tribal guy and whore. This was in a way filler; in case I didn't cast the whore part at the zero hour, I would have found more things for the priest to do. Between actually having the whore character after all and a losing a bit of time to parade float logistics, I wasted George's time today. We never shot him. It's a shame, and I feel bad about it.

The very good news, however, is we did shoot the entire range of motion for a difficult scene, the soldier/prostitute trick scene. The actions opens with the whore preening.

We all felt D'Mari did a good job of establishing her character as a desirable sex object advertising her services.

Laurent's experience shooting fashion was a great assist in explaining to D'Mari how to act with her shoes. The bad news there is that we destroyed these nice shoes having her grind them in the gravel.

We were very limited in shot setup by a stage that the guys at Atomic Cowboy understandably did not want to move for the occasion. John walked into the frame from the other side of the stage, though we could not see the stage in any shot. Notice in the corner an idol where we would have shot the priest and tribal guy if we didn't have a whore actor for the day.

I didn't shoot a still of their simulated sex act, but here is Laurent showing them a take.

You can double-click on these images to enlarge them. John is having an interesting reaction to his scene here.




The Pridefest parade floaters returned while we were shooting the sex scene. Fortunately, Elly had some great long shots of the soldier and whore rutting by then. Here Laurent shoots tight with the parade truck behind him as D'Mari prepares to leave the soldier lying on the ground after he has satisfied himself.

The scene ends with the soldier lying on the ground having a smoke alone. John smoked himself sick. I liked the way the soldier looked dead lying there.

His helmet and gun made an interesting tableaux against a Buddhist sculpture in the Atomic Cowboy courtyard. Oppenheimer, who ran the physics side of the military bomb shop, was a student of Oriental religions, so this works as a deep inside joke for anyone who notices this rock is more than just a rock.

Pouring wax into the ears of stuffed donkeys with Salvador Dali

When I was carrying on about a scene from our movie Blind Cat Black opening for Luis Bunuel at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, a card-carrying St. Louis Surrealist quietly objected.

My friend Andrew Torch pointed out that on one of the two films The Pulitzer was screening with the local silent shorts, Un Chien Andalou, Bunuel shares filmmaking credit with Salvador Dali.

I told Andy I had planned to come back, actually, and go into all of that. So I have come back to go into all of that.

In My Last Sigh, probably the best filmmaker's memoir I've read, Bunuel tells us about his collaboration with Dali on what has become the definitive Surrealist film.

When I arrived to spend a few days at Dali's house in Figueras, I told him about a dream I'd had in which a long, tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor blade slicing through an eye. Dali immediately told me that he'd seen a hand crawling with ants in a dream he'd had the previous night.

"And what if we started right there and made a film?" he wondered aloud.

Bunuel and Dali each dreamt one of the two central images of the film, and it was Dali who suggested they turn the images into a film. Bunuel has a clear and rational account of their method in writing this wonderfully irrational film.

Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.

They ended up with a film scenario  Bunuel knew no one in the industry would finance, so he put the touch on his dear mother. God knows good mothers are owed an immense debt for keeping their weird sons in business until the industry catches up with them.

Bunuel's account of shooting the film (over two weeks in 1928) speaks to the way I like to make movies: "The filming took two weeks; there were only five or six of us involved, most of the time no one quite knew what he was doing."

The number of people involved on set ranged from five to six because Dali was only intermittently involved in the shoot: "Dali arrived on the set a few days before the end," Bunuel writes, "and spent most of his time pouring wax into the ears of stuffed donkeys."

Typing up these quotes from an unglued paperback of My Last Sigh I read half to death on a trip to Africa, I am struck by something. Bunuel's never-to-be-forgotten image of the razor blade slicing the eye was his association from a different image that he actually had seen in his dream: "a long, tapering cloud sliced the moon in half."

Last night, The Pulitzer screened the Bunuel films (and one of three reels of local shorts) in its open-air courtyard, projected against a building. I liked that atmosphere very, very much. Especially last night, when the St. Louis sky overhead was rippled with clouds.

In the scene where the razor blade slices the eye, as usual, I looked away from the film. This time, I looked up into the clouds.

*

The film event, a coolaboration with Cinema St. Louis, was organized in connection to The Pulitzer's current show, Dreamscapes, which is a heart-breaker and brain-tickler and a half.

Poetry Scores opens for Luis Bunuel at The Pulitzer

Poetry Scores is opening for Luis Bunuel!

This Friday, June 24, a scene from our first movie Blind Cat Black (2007) will screen at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts before a Bunuel double feature: Un Chien Andalou (1928) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974).

Aaron AuBuchon, lead editor on Blind Cat Black, is in a bewildered state of ecstasy. A movie project he took on based on a pharoah he had tattooed on one of his biceps is now the opening act for two of his favorite films ever made.

Aaron edited the segment from our movie, "This monstrous traveler in hashish," that will screen Friday at the Pulitzer. It was selected by Cinema St. Louis as one of the locally made "short, silent films which include dream-related content" that will screen between 8 and 9 p.m. Friday, "projected in loops on surfaces outside at the Pulitzer".

It was a contest, actually. At 9 p.m. the winner (Brendan Leahy, for “The Tower”) will be awarded $500, then it's on to the masterworks of Bunuel.

I entered this scene from our movie as a short with "dream-related content" because it could work a stand-alone short (at 2:02) and Aaron did edit it as a dream. The contest form I filled out called for a "Description". I filled in: "Dream -- or zombie orgy?"

As a Poetry Scores movie, Blind Cat Black was written, shot and edited to a poetry score we already had produced to the Turkish poem of that name (presented in the elegant English translation by Murat Nemet-Nejat). We produce our scores as a sequence of stand-alone songs, and the music to "This monstrous traveler in hashish" was licensed from Latif Bolat.

Aaron took several hours of footage shot by the ever-alusive Chizmo on Super Bowl Sunday, 2006, at CBGB on South Grand and edited it into this piece all on his lonesome. My shooting script was simple, in its own way, and made no mention of a dream.

The script called for our protagonist, The Absent Minded Tightrope Walker (the hip-hop grinder Toyy Davis), to wake up on a pile of corpses. Her lover (the R&B star Bradd Young) finds her on the pile of corpses. They make love. As their lovemaking becomes more intense, the corpses gradually come alive in a zombie orgy.

I don't know why Aaron edited the scene to look like it could have been a dream. Maybe his pharoah tattoo knows. But I like what he did with my concept, and his decision made it possible for this scene to become one of 22 local movies that will open for two of his favorite-ever films on Friday night.

*

Dream Sequences: Film Night at the Pulitzer with Cinema St. Louis goes down (and around and around, at least the local short loop) 8 p.m. Friday, June 24 at Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington Blvd. Like dreams, it's free.

Atomic Cowboy as whore's fence, Army commissary, Los Alamos office

I recently read Conquest of the Useless, the journals that Werner Herzog kept while making the film Fitzcarraldo. It's a great read about one of my favorite films. It made me want to watch Fitzcarraldo again. Watching the film again made me wonder why Herzog put his cast and crew through such hell to make this movie. He insisted they shoot in the Amazon. As a result, people crashed and burned in plane flights across the jungle, contracted malaria, and were impaled on the arrows of angry tribesmen. And in the end, most of the film could have been shot along any leafy river, if not in Herzog's backyard in L.A.

We started shooting our movie Go South for Animal Index in Cuba. That's Cuba, Missouri. Okay, it's not a distant malarial country with hostile pre-industrial natives. But it is a long drive for a volunteer cast and crew. The location there, a farm owned by friends of ours, is pretty rugged. It's a long drive up a rough road that requires four-wheel-drive, and there is a lot of real estate to cover on the farm between locations and home base, making it possible to lose an hour in simply relaying messages back and forth.

I love shooting there, but the director is always more invested in making a movie, better prepared to endure hardship and expense, than the cast and crew, even in a collective endeavor like Poetry Scores. I've felt compelled to find more convenient locations for as many shoots as I can. Reading Herzog's book about making Fitzacarraldo made me realize that less rugged and remote in location need not translate into less rugged and wild on screen.

So I was at Atomic Cowboy recently to produce a public event for a friend. Walking around the courtyard of this oh so conveniently situated venue, I realized I was looking at a leafy fenceline.

(When I shot these reference images my wife went along to add human scale, as requested by Laurent Torno III, our direct of photography.)

There are major storylines in our movie involving leafy fencelines. I have spent a lot of time in the wilds of Cuba looking for leafy fencelines. Here is one, I realized, that would probably work for the scene where the soldier wanders off the military base bomb factory, Lost Almost, and finds temporary comfort in the arms of a whore who lingers around the base. (My wife was not cast as the whore.)



There are tribal people living on the fringe of the base in our movie, just as there were at the historical Los Alamos. (My wife, in fact, plays a tribal person.) It's a little over the top, but Atomic Cowboy even has a tribal idol the soldier could wander past on his way to some action.

When I turned around from the fence at Atomic Cowboy, thiking about movie locations, I was looking at the outdoors bar at Atomic Cowboy. Given its mode of construction (Quonset hut), this could so easily be a military base comissary.



Our movie needs a military base commissary! Another soldier orders a hamburger there, which he then trades for moonshine with the tramp who lives in the woods.



The commissary has funky tile we'd need to mask, or accept in its spectacular weirdness -- all wrong for a military base, but maybe all right for a military base in a silent zombie movie based on a highly conceptual poem (by Stefene Russell).




 This bike would have to come down, though it's arguably period.



Just today, when I was shooting these reference images, I noticed in the corner of the Quonset hut at Atomic Cowboy an old-fashioned wood-burning stove.



Our movie needs an old-fashioned wood-burning stove! At the actual Los Alamos, the base's executive secretary (aka the Atomic Lady) used the wood-burning stove in her office to burn secret documents, which was a daily occurrence at a place that, at the time, officially did not exist.



We are making a silent movie based on a long poem that should import no (or very little) language other than the poem into the movie. That means no intertitles to set the scene or move the narrative along. In a purely visual medium, burning by hand documents shown to be secret is a great way to suggest the secrecy of the environment, so I plan to rely a lot on this.

The stove will be behind the secretary's desk, which will be a focal point in the movie. During the intake scenes, the secretary is flanked the general who runs the military side of the base and the physicist who runs the nucleur bomb shot. The sightline away from the desk, shooting the recruits coming in, is not at all great. We'd want to line up soldiers back there, or some plywood painted grey, to mask the shot.



This is a crucial location in our movie, and I found a great candidate for it in St. Clair, Missouri, on property owned by Donny Blake and family. St. Clair is closer than Cuba, but not nearly as close as Atomic Cowboy on the near South Side.



I'll be tempted to try to make this interior work for the Los Alamos office. The exit of the intake office needs to lead to the exterior in St. Clair, which leads to a perfect walk down to the shed we are using as a bomb shop. The exit at Atomic Cowboy:



The exterior in St. Clair:



Lots more pictures of the St. Clair location for Lost Almost are over here. It is a fabulous location, though matching its exterior to the interior at Atomic Cowboy would require some work and luck. It helps that the Atomic Cowboy interior does not exit from this angle to a Quonset hut exterior!

Another problem. All three of these locations in the same tavern's courtyard -- whore's fence, commisary, and intake office -- would need to appear in the movie as three separate universes that are not this directly physically connected.

We can shoot tight on the fence and make this work for that scene. Though we'd need to shoot tight in between these two telephone poles, which can't appear. (None of the other junk would be in the courtyard for the shoot.)



Looking out from the commissary you see a similar leafy fence to what is in the soldier and whore shot.

I can live with that. It would be the same flora anyway, on the base and outside it. Also, we can stack up soldiers behin Pfc. Sack when he places his hamburger order.

Oh, and Buddha would have to go from the commissary, though he could pop back up in Opje's (Oppenheimer's) home, if we can borrow it for the day.




Some of this is supposed to happen, I would say, as fate looked down from the drink specials board as we left today.



I know, Atomic Cowboy, Manhattan Project -- it's not such a shocking coincidence. That's why we held our early meetings for the movie at Atomic Cowboy. Which is why it makes so damn much sense to shoot some of it here!

Mad Art's kitchen as zombie uranium mill

Yesterday I posted the good news that we have found a location for the zombie uranium mine we need for our movie Go South for Animal Index, a fable of Los Alamos, of the building of the Bomb. We also now have a location for the zombie* uranium mill: the kitchen at our own Mad Art Gallery in St. Louis, host venue for the Annual Poetry Scores Art Invitational.

Milling raw uranium into fissionable material was, in reality, a massive industrial process that required the construction of a facility the size of an entire town in Tennessee. We are making a silent movie on no budget in the style of a fable, so we are taking matters into our own hands, or into the hands of our zombie uranium millers.

My concept is to take something granular that looks like it were chipped from a mine and then turn that into something that looks like cornbread (yellowcake uranium), which would then be turned into something that looks like plum pulp (because Richard Rhodes writes that the plutonium that went into the first nuclear bombs was about the size and color of a plum).

For this, I figured, we need a nice-sized kitchen that would accommodate four to eight zombie uranium millers. We will basically supply them with foodstuffs that could result in something that looks like cornbread and something that looks like plum pulp, and let them have something of an experimental zombie food fight.

We have now found that kitchen -- and in proprietor Ron Buchuele, we may even have another zombie uranium miller.

We can get a nice long shot from this angle, and only need to move the fan and the clock. Zombies tell no time and need no fan-blown breezes.

A longer shot. The stuff under the table needs to go, too.

We can shoot in from another angle as well. Trashcan comes out.

This angle nicely permits a glimpse into a jail cell (Mad Art is a renovated police station). I say we staff the uranium mill with some solidiers and have them hang out in the cell when they aren't watching the undead do their thing.

Let's take a look around the space. There are windows we'd need to mask from the outside so the changing light doesn't mess with our shoot.

We are stuck with the dry erase board, but can draw some nuclear physics on there, which will help tie the uranium mill to the bomb shop at Lost Almost (Los Alamos).

Logo on the vent needs to be masked with "debased cogs" logo. Our movie is based on a poem by the same name by Stefene Russell; "debased cogs" is her phrase for uranium workers.

Love the green paint, almost as much as the silver freezers.

Love the grimy working stoves.

"Vulcan" is so primal I say we leave the logo.

I talked Ron through my concept for the shoot, and he said for the granular thing the zombies bring in as if from the uranium mine, we should use couscous (rather than corn meal, my idea) because it will be easier to mold into shapes. So we got out some couscous. I like the way it looks. More granular than corn meal.

I see zombies playing with couscous in my mind's eye now. Now where do I get a whole bunch of cheap (or free) couscous?
*

* Zombie. Why zombies?

For the first poetry scores movie, Blind Cat Black, lead editor Aaron AuBuchon suggested we use zombies when I was looking for a visual element to evoke the Surrealist style of Ece Ayhan's poem (and Murat Nemet-Nejat's English translation). I liked the idea. When I put it into practice, I noticed a huge change. It used to be, when I told people I was making a silent movie, they quietly excused themselves. But when I started telling people I was making a silent zombie movie, they bought a round of beers and we talked for five hours. There was no turning back.

Also, the more I thought about the poems we had scored or were scoring, which would be the basis for our silent movies, I could easily imagine a set of zombie characters in every one. Let's face it. In every story ever told, there is a character or a set of characters that is the living dead, understood in one way or another. Though I have come to make a distinction -- we don't make silent zombie movies, we make silent movies with zombies. Zombies are just one of many elements we use, like poetry, music, the narrative structure and technique of the fable, and St. Louis.

Crystal City Underground as zombie uranium mine

This year Poetry Scores is finishing a movie, Go South for Animal Index. Like all of our movies, it is a silent movie with zombies (as opposed to a silent zombie movie). Our zombies in this movie are uranium miners, millers, and couriers. That's because our movie is drawn from Stefene Russell's poem of the same name, which we already have set to music (we are now shooting and editing to that poetry score), and it's a poem about the Bomb.

We need to shoot uranium miners, millers, and couriers. So we need a uranium mine and mill, and some passages between mine and mill, and more passages between mill and bomb shop. We are starting to find what we need.

Dawn Majors, who is helping us to shoot the movie, took me out to Crystal City Underground, an old sand mine in Crystal City. This is pretty amazing, since we want our zombies to come out of the mine with something that looks like corn meal. They will be trundling it out in wheelbarrows. When it occurred to me that it would cost a lot of money to buy a wheelbarrow full of corn meal, I figured out we could fill up a wheelbarrow of sand then just dust that with corn meal. Well, our mine has plenty of sand.

Further, we need the illusion of mass production, though we only want to shoot a limited amount of action. So it would be perfect if our mine has visible evidence of completed work of the kind we need to simulate completing. Our mine has that, too.

It has a pile of sandbags. So we can shoot our zombies chipping away at the walls, and shake something that looks like corn meal coming off the walls. Then shoot the zombies bagging the corn meal, and putting the bags on this pile of sandbags. They will then fill wheelbarrows from the pile and trundle them out of the mine.

A wider shot of our zombie miner workspace. My photos are not great. There also are endless passageways in the mine to shoot the zombies trundling down, though my pictures don't really show them off. Did I mention the mine is wired for electricity and has plenty of lights? Our mine is wired for electricity and has plenty of lights.

Our mine also has a large underground lake, but it doesn't really fit this movie. Next time.

We need to get our zombies out of the mine. This is what one appraoch to the best exit looks like. Not bad. The other approach looks better, but my pictures look worse.

This is the exterior the zombies will emerge from. Probably we will need to shoot tighter so we don't see these trucks (see below).

There is some trashy looking stuff in the exterior we'd have to live with or laboriously move, like these bricks.

Also, a truck bed with a logo, which we would have to mask (perhaps with a "Debased Cogs"* logo; see above) or shoot around.

We would also need to mask the logo on this truck, which doesn't run anymore. I guess we'd also need to explain why the zombies don't drive trucks instead of trundle wheelbarrows. Come to think of it, we will need to shoot around the trucks.

We need the zombies to trundle away from the mine, toward the mill. This road will come in handy for that.

We also have a bridge to play with. Nice river below I should have shot. This is great, because we have rivers in other segments of the movie.

We also need a road lined with barbed wire for people driving in and out of the bomb shop, the military base, Lost Almost. Crystal City Underground has that.

I've been fantastizing about a long fence line like this where we can control traffic. Got it.

At the moment, the mine also tornado shelters which would make perfect zombie homes.

Or a perfect zombie village.
Pretty good day on the location scout, eh? And there's more! (To be continued.)
* "Debased Cogs": In a poetry score, we set to music every line in a poem; our movies are silents shot and edited to these scores. In Go South for Animal Index, Stefene Russell writes:

There are no alchemists, only opportunists
And beneath them the debased cogs
Who bear wheelbarrows, packed full of lightning.

The "debased cogs" in our movie are the grunt workers on the bomb project, the zombies.

Praying for Japan with Brad Gibson and Anonymous

About two years ago, while in Seattle for a journalism conference, a friend of a friend took me out to a local gig, helping me look for someone to write songs with while I was in town. It was a fun night out with good local music, but produced no Seattle songwriting partner.

Until now.

I went to the pub that night in Seattle to see one band, but went home (as often happens) thinking about another. I was particularly taken with the drummer, Bradley Gibson. I dumped a bunch of Poetry Scores projects on this guy, knowing that somehow, someday, I would try to work with him.

Turns out it might be he who is working with me. The message came today.

I've got a new song that I'm really jazzed about. Not being a wordsmith, I thought I'd throw it your direction and see if something stuck with you. Let me know what you think!

http://bradgibson.com/news/entry/healing-for-japan/

Thanks,
Brad

I am a now or never guy. I listened to the song. It's really beautiful. Since it's a healing song for Japan, in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, I thought to score a traditional Japenese text with it.

Thanks to Twitter, which is also how Brad and I keep in touch, I recently read this great essay about protective children spirits in medieval Japan. I have been wanting to make some use of it, and here was my chance.

Rereading the essay, I found this passage about healing:

He (the prime minister) said, “While I was asleep, I was just dreaming that fearsome demons were inflicting all manner of tortures on me when a boy with his hair done in a bun on each side and carrying a wand came in the direction of the inner gate and drove the demons off with the wand, till they scattered and ran away. When I asked him who he was, he said, ‘A certain priest of the Gokuraku-ji, grieving over your illness, has been beside the inner gate ever since this morning, praying for you by zealously reciting the Ninnō Sutra, the scripture he has recited for many years. As a tutelary spirit watching over him, I have driven off these evil demons which were afflicting you.’ At that point I woke up, and afterwards felt quite well, just as if I had been wiped clean of an illness.”

It is taken from Uji shūi Monogatari, a 13th century collection of Japanese tales.

I thought that might work. I pared it down to a lyric, pulling out a line for refrain and title that seemed to match the feel and intent of the music.

"Praying for you"

The man said, “While I was asleep,
I was dreaming
that demons were inflicting
tortures on me

Then a boy with his hair
done in a bun
came carrying a wand
and drove the demons away.

When I asked the boy
who he was, he said,
"A holy man grieving
over your illness, has been

praying for you.

As a tutelary spirit watching
over this holy man,
I have driven off these demons
that were afflicting you.’

At that point I woke up,
and afterwards felt quite well,
as if I had been wiped clean,
wiped clean of an illness.”

The author is unknown, Anonymous, though the translator, Douglas E. Mills, gets a credit, if Brad uses these words. I'd be happy to take one, too, but the Poetry Scores concept hasn't exactly crept into our concepts of music publishing. We have a tradition of crediting the arrangers of other people's music, but not other people's words.

One of the things I love best about the Poetry Scores approach is you get to write songs with people from other cultures and centuries. Who knows what 13th century Japanese wordsmith will be working with Brad, if he tries to make these words work? As for Douglas Mills, it took some sleuthing, but I found a chronicle of Fifty Years of Japanese at Cambridge University. Douglas Mills' memoir starts at page 58.

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Prayerful image from Gokuraku-ji (mentioned in the passage the lyric is taken from) from Lissette's Picasa album and belongs to her, not me.